For one of this week’s film offerings, we’ve chosen a short piece whose fusion of post-apocalyptic horror, beauty, starkness, and surreality is guaranteed to fascinate and disturb. And that’s not even to mention the astonishing brilliance of the visual effects and sound design, nor the even more astonishing fact that “Parasite Choi” is a collaborative international project that was created by a team of digital artists working asynchronously from multiple locations.
Directed by French filmmaker Damien Steck and produced by SR Partners (a London-based motion graphics studio) and OUKA Studio (Steck’s own production company), “PARASITE CHOI is a collaborative project including more than 15 digital artists from 10 countries all around the world. This movie was premiered at the famous Offf festival 2012.” The list of contributing artists includes OUKA Studio plus Murat Pak, Tim Borgmann, Gabor Ekes, Andrey Nepomnyaschev, Ben Reubold, CAOH, Chimera Studio, Emrah Gonulkirmaz, Icecream, Kim Holm, Monologue, Tom Waterhouse, and Ihsu Yoon.
The film’s “plot,” such as it is, centers on the world’s last remaining human, who wanders in a kind of trance through a vast, lifeless desert while undergoing an endless series of simultaneously horrifying and beautiful transformations under the power of some monstrous, undefined force.